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Re:Unum Computing: An Energy Efficient and Massively Paralle... by dnautics on Friday July 24, 2015 @05:10PM (#9945217)
For any unum system there's an 'archtecture spec' that puts parameters on the maximum sizes of the exponent and mantissa. You can have values that consume less bits, the format contains a tag that says how many bits you are consuming for each part of your number, a lower size indicates for exact values that less size is needed; for uncertain values it means the uncertainty is higher.

You could pad your values to achieve constant time indexing.

Re:Unum Computing: An Energy Efficient and Massively Paralle... by davisourus on Friday July 24, 2015 @06:21PM (#9945563)
This is exactly right - there's an environmental configuration. Think of the way it's ridiculous to play angrybirds with 32 or 64bit precision on your phone, you could set the precision appropriately. Or on the other side, think of how IEEE lops off data from every multiply or divide (any precision) without any point of reference for uncertainty.